Watching You(24)

The wounds on his right knuckles had opened up again. He felt exposed.

The rain thudded against the nearly pitch-black windows.

The lights, which were on a timer, went out. The character of the stairwell changed. A different sort of darkness fell on the previously mundane landing. He was in a different universe, the real universe, where darkness reigned. All light is an illusion, a reassuring veneer of lies to help us stay alive, to help us bear growing up. He was in a different era now, one that was still governed by barbarism, where the chimaera of civilisation had not yet made its entrance.

He was in a raw, unadorned world.

There was no getting away from it.

He could see the switch glowing red through the darkness. It was only a few metres away. All he had to do was pull the pick from the lock, switch the lights on and go back out into Vidargatan. Around the corner people were thronging under the artificial lights of Odenplan. It was all just half a minute away.

Yet somehow not. It seemed to be on the other side of the universe. Billions of light years away.

And Berger was here. Caught in the darkness. Captivated by the darkness.

He heard a click as the pick caught. He pulled out his pistol, raised his torch and opened the door.

There was a faint tugging draught, as if the air pressure was much lower inside the flat than in the world outside. And it was utterly dark.

He focused his attention inside the flat and listened. Not a sound, in fact no real sensory impressions at all. No smell. And no booby trap. A peculiar emptiness. Two rooms and a kitchen. He had a quick look around the bathroom. Clean but spartan. No stains in the bowl. No toothbrush. The kitchen was just as clean, but there was a mug in the sink with deeply engrained coffee residue. The dishwasher was empty. The bedroom: sheets on the bed, no bedspread, no duvet. And at this time of year you really needed a duvet. Finally the living room. No dust on the flat-screen television. The remote left neatly on top of the entertainment unit. A stereo that was a fair few years old. CD player. When did people stop using CD players? The leather sofa was hard, didn’t seem to have been worn in. He sniffed a couple of cushions on the sofa and a neatly folded blanket. They all smelled more of a factory than a home. And the books on the shelves were so commonplace that it was almost absurd: travel writing, international bestsellers, nothing that gave the slightest indication of individual taste.

When he had glanced through all the rooms he shone the torch over the walls. He was looking for two things: signs of alarms or surveillance cameras, and any shift in the colour of the walls. He found nothing. At least not in the subdued glow of the torch. Everything looked far too normal. The coffee mug in the sink was the only indication that anyone lived here.

It worried him. It suggested an asceticism which in turn suggested a degree of fixation, focus on a task that was more important than life itself. Life wasn’t just something that happened while you were planning something else. And in this instance there simply wasn’t a life to uncover – at least not here.

He pulled the floor plan from his pocket. Wandered round, trying to identify all the internal and external walls of the flat. It didn’t take long. Unless Nathalie Fredén had got hold of one of the neighbouring flats, there were no hidden compartments here. No labyrinths.

He pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and returned to the bathroom. He ran his hand along the skirting board and found a quantity of dust. Then he looked behind the shower curtain again. Nothing but a bathtub. A shower set at a height that would have been enough for him to wash his chest but no higher than that. No shampoo, no shower gel. And, again, no toothbrush.

No one lived anywhere without a toothbrush. Either you were away and had your toothbrush with you, or you spent most of your time somewhere else. Ordinarily at your partner’s home.

Which means that there’s somewhere else.

And possibly even a partner …

He’d had enough. There was nothing else to discover. No hidden corners. Nothing lurking just below the surface. Or at least nothing that could be found without the help of the person in question.

He sat down at the kitchen table, with a view in two directions: the hall and front door, and the window looking out onto the courtyard. The storm was whipping the almost bare branches of a scarcely visible aspen tree, but the clatter of the rain drowned out everything else. He positioned the torch so that it was shining straight up at the ceiling and put his service pistol down on the table in front of him. He ran his gloved finger over the shiny wood surface and smelled it. Finally, a smell: his own plastic glove. Nothing else.

He remained seated there beneath an umbrella of weak torchlight. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps time was merely passing. Although he glanced down at his Rolex every so often he lost track of how much time passed. Even if he had made a real effort, it wouldn’t have been possible to see the time; the face of the watch was by now almost completely obscured by condensation.

Berger didn’t particularly react to the footsteps out in the stairwell. The likelihood of their belonging to Nathalie Fredén was infinitesimal. She had flown the coop, all this shit was in vain.

He felt like crying.

He wished he could remember how.

Fifteen-year-old Ellen Savinger was lost.

The steps were right outside now. Inside himself he heard them shuffle past, carrying on to the next floor. Like a hope flaring up and then vanishing again, instantly forgotten, leaving nothing but a vacuum.

But inside wasn’t the same as outside.